August Querfurt
1696–1761 · Holy Roman Empire · Baroque
The story
In the Belvedere hang two small oak panels by August Querfurt that read as a pair from one day's sport. In the first, a riding party sets off for a hawking hunt. In the second, the falcons have brought down herons, and heron hawking was the form of the hunt that 18th-century courts ranked highest.
Horses, riders and open country were Querfurt's whole trade. Born in 1696 in Wolfenbüttel, in northern Germany, he learned from his father Tobias, a painter of landscapes and animals, then trained in Augsburg under Georg Philipp Rugendas, a specialist in battle scenes. His model was Dutch, above all Philips Wouwerman, the 17th-century painter of cavalry and hunting parties, and older reference books describe Querfurt as an able imitator of that manner.
He ended up in Vienna, where the commissions came from the top. Empress Maria Theresa ordered from him eight paintings of episodes from the War of the Austrian Succession, and they are now in the Museum of Military History in Vienna, the city where he died in 1761.
